Can YouNoodle Really Value Your Start-up with an Online Quiz?

Every entrepreneur and investor should consider checking out YouNoodle, an online social network for start-ups that we discovered today when reading a cover story on Inc.com titled "What's Your Company Worth."
YouNoodle, as a social network for entrepreneurs, has many features you'd expect. Start-ups can create a profile of their firm and VCs can also login to connect with potential investment opportunities. There is even a Twitter-like feed which allows you to "follow" the day-to-day happenings of companies that you find interesting.

But the tool which has really generated buzz (and probably drives most of their inbound traffic) is their start-up evaluator quiz. Enter in data such as manager experience, patented technologies, revenue raised and voila!--YouNoodle predicts what your company will be worth in three years. So far, over 6000 entrepreneurs have tried the evaluator, according to Inc's report.

Writes Max Chafkin:

YouNoodle's CEO, Bob Goodson, 28, says the company's goal is to break down the "old boys' club" of top-tier venture capital investors. He imagines that founders outside of traditional venture capital networks -- that is, people who live in the middle of the country and didn't go to one of a handful of top schools -- will eventually be able to take the test and earn meetings with investors on the strength of their YouNoodle scores. Investors, he says, will pay for access to the reports in the same way that used-car buyers pay for a vehicle history report from services like Carfax. "We want to build a Moody's for the start-up world," Goodson says.

As any entrepreneur knows, VC evaluations are anything but a hard science. So can a computer algorithm really predict the value of a firm better than experienced investors?